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Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats
ericatcw writes "Taking a page out of McDonalds 'billions and billions served,' Microsoft says it reaps $1.3 billion a year from more than 100 million users of its SharePoint collab app. But some suggest that the figures are consciously inflated by Microsoft sales tactics in order to boost the appearance of momentum for the platform, reports Computerworld. A recent survey suggests that less than a fourth of users licensed for SharePoint actually use it. SharePoint particularly lags as a platform for Web sites, according to the same survey, a situation Microsoft hopes to fix with the upcoming SharePoint 2010."
I don't use Share Point and I don't especially like Microsoft but just to put things in perspective:
We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users, .NET tags added to user agent just because you used windows update to update your computer, etc. etc.)
A good rule of thumb could be to divide any of those numbers at least by 2 to get a better picture of realty.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
That's just preposterous! I can tell you for sure that over 5 trillion servers run sharepoint, and not one of them has ever crashed.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Saying that they make that much money is not inaccurate, if they in fact do make that much money.
I don't see in the summary (and had enough of the anti-MS posts for the day to read deeper) any relation between revenue/profits and userbase. Of course, not everyone that buys the bundle is going to use it.
Also, as far as SharePoint being pointed externally to the web, I do not think many people use it with that intent, as it seems mostly useful as a proprietary (read: internal only) knowledge base, and data repository.
Seriously. It's overly complex, and doesn't really make anything easier for the vast majority of users. It's a nice IDEA, but in practice, it just gets in the way. It's one of those things that big companies buy and use thinking that it will solve their communication problems, when in fact all it does is create different and worse problems.
Fuck SharePoint
Ok, three more words:
in the asshole
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Mozilla and many other web apps counts every download as a user, ignoring the many users who had to download it multiple times because the download kept failing due to timeouts from their excessively overloaded servers.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Both Nintendo and Sony report actual 'sold to customer' for their sales numbers.
Microsoft, however, consistently lies about their sales figures for the Xbox by using 'shipped to retailer' numbers in order to make their worldwide sales numbers look larger than they actually are.
They even went so far as to flood the retail channel a couple holiday seasons ago with extra Xbox 360 consoles by leveraging their other Microsoft products just so they could put out press releases claiming huge 'sales'. There were giant stacks of unsold Xbox 360s sitting in stores for months after the holidays because Microsoft has so overstuffed the retail channel.
No surprise that they are doing the same type of installed base/sales inflating. Standard operating procedure for Microsoft.
Sharepoint is a honking great pile of meaningless crap that just creates costs for everyone at every turn. The last I looked at it you *have* to run it as a default site, so that means you need yet another server and it's part of the panopoly of ridiculous deployment shite coming from the MSDN lunatics at the company that you can use to blow your foot off with. There is also a ton of confusion as to how it should actually be used, and considering that it is sold to enterprises pretty much exclusively then people scratching their heads over how to use it and what it is actually does is not good. What's worse is that people don't want to learn what it is for either. If someone feels they need a CMS or something then they will go out and get one.
Because it only seems to be sold to 'enterprises' that means that the wider world isn't using it at all and many software developers won't be writing for it either. As a result it has no mindshare whatsoever. I was always suspicious that there was any kind of real momentum behind it.
Whether every single SharePoint CAL that was purchased is actually in use, is irrelevant to the point of ridicule.
Did they sell it? Did someone BUY it? THEN COUNT it, baby!
Instead of bitching, someone should be crediting Microsoft for how they manage their CALs and bundling.
This is like arguing over how many copies of MS Paint are used on a daily basis. It hardly matters. Microsoft sold it, and pocketed the income, which is cash that most likely WONT go to a SharePoint competitor, whether SharePoint gets used or not.
Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats
But some suggest...
A recent survey suggests...
suggest From Meriam Webster: .
synonyms suggest, imply, hint, intimate, insinuate mean to convey an idea indirectly. suggest may stress putting into the mind by association of ideas, awakening of a desire, or initiating a train of thought . imply is close to suggest but may indicate a more definite or logical relation of the unexpressed idea to the expressed . hint implies the use of slight or remote suggestion with a minimum of overt statement . intimate stresses delicacy of suggestion without connoting any lack of candor . insinuate applies to the conveying of a usually unpleasant idea in a sly underhanded manner
I work for a small computer support firm and we have around 400 SBS 2003 and 2008 customers. All of them have Sharepoint installed. None of them know it exists. Exactly one of them uses it for anything (web access to shared calendar).
Hell, I can't even figure out what it's good for.
A good rule of thumb could be to divide any of those numbers at least by 2 to get a better picture of realty.
I applied your correction factor to the number 2 you mentioned and that changed the correction factor to 1. Now that means your correction factor is back to 2. Now I am stuck in endless recursion and am going to run out stack and coredump.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wake me when Microsoft (or any other big company for that matter) doesn't fib, distort, or outright lie about their sales.
On the other hand, Does anyone know of a viable FOSS alternative to Sharepoint? (I'm not trolling, I figure by now there probably would be one but if there is I'm not aware of it.)
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
You are a shill. Honest advice? First disclose your ties and vested interests. Do you get a cut of share point sales too? Gregory Bullard?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Before posting a knee-jerk bash of Microsoft, maybe you should read the last four paragraphs of the article, which are actually fairly positive in favor of SharePoint:
Even if SharePoint's actual use today is overstated, most analysts feel the product's impact on the market isn't.
Sampson described SharePoint as a "juggernaut," while DeGroot called it "the most successful noncore product ['core' being products like e-mail, file and print, for example] that Microsoft has come up with."
"Microsoft may oversell its success, but that should be considered normal corporate behavior, and there is some fire underneath the smoke," he said.
"I go to a lot of places where the IT department says that SharePoint usage is just growing like a weed," said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst at CMS Watch. "So it's possible there are actually more SharePoint users than are actually licensed for it. But nobody really knows."
I administer the free version of Sharepoint at work. (sharepoint 3.0)
It's yet another tool from Microsoft where -
All the data is stored in one large impenetrable database blob - most content is stored in two dimensional "lists", which somewhat limits what you can do in terms of building online forms etc. ALL the list data is stored in the one table, which makes it non-intuitive to make that data visible outside of sharepoint.
It's easy for end users to generate lists, calendars, annoucement pages, document stores, surveys etc etc to their hearts content, so you end up with a big sprawling mess if it's poorly administered
it's easy to add canned 'web parts" but impossble to alter the functionality of those parts. eg, try to prevent staff from seeing survey results, for example. (yes, it's possible but it's not exactly intuitive, and extremely hard without the assitance of Sharepoint designer, which was not free until recently)
Microsoft keep changing the search engine strategy for the product; Search has mysteriously failed on our implementation with few error messages to provide clues.
It doesn't really work properly unless you integrate it with Active directory, Microsoft Office, Infopath, and ideally MS Exchange. Vendor lockin for the win!
So why are we using it? Our staff love it, as it's easy for the end user to figure out; but it's an absolute pig to administer.
In terms of usage stats, I note it comes with every copy of Windows small business server. Perhaps they're including that in the usage stats?
I'm working on a project right now for setting up an internal document management system. Ran up a blind alley of learning Drupal (that took a while!) only to discover that it wasn't suitable. Evaluated a few more (including SharePoint) and ended up going with the free and open-source TikiWiki instead. To quote McDonald's, I'm loving it!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
to reduce the unused space on my hard drive
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Unless you need the most simplistic, minimal workflow, 90s table based GUI, and wanna avoid developers like a plague..
I am NOT alone, read this
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/256407/what-are-your-biggest-complaints-about-sharepoint
I work at a large IT company and our CIO has deployed SharePoint for everything. It has made finding any information nearly impossible.
Licensed copies of the software $100,000
Software and development products $500,000.
Training. $150,000
Hire more people. $1,000,000
New hardware $500,000.
Billions from thousands
Then start developing. 10 times as long to get a product out.
So how much would a GNU project cost now?
Ubuntu server Free :) Free
Web Page Tutuorial for setting up Joomullalalala
Hardware, probably donated junk Free
Cost of operation, Electricity.
Hone those OSS skills boy's. With the Whitehouse bailing out mofo's left and right they'll need to cut costs.
There is no wizard for starting a new sharepoint application in Visual Studio.
There is no deployment wizard for deploying a sharepoint solution.
There is no live debugger for debugging a sharepoint webpart.
You thought Vista liked RAM.
There's your billions.
The US and many other governments use Sharepoint almost exclusively for intranet sites. I know the DOD is big on Sharepoint and so are many other agencies and departments. That would amount to a big part of what you think doesn't exist. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean they aren't selling it. Stop being so biased Slashdot.
The way Microsoft licensing works, all the devs where I work have the "everything and the kitchen sink" MSDN subscription... and, I just looked at and it includes sharepoint.
Dear Microsoft Corporation,
I am considering upgrading from MS Paint to Sharepoint. I am concerned, however, about the ease of use of Sharepoint versus MS Paint. I have heard that Sharepoint can be complex and may take a long time to learn. I mostly draw funny captions on pictures of cats. Is Sharepoint the best platform for me? I am also considering Zimbra and SugarCRM.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to your reply and detailed licensing information.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
We use it as our organization's Intranet, and would never consider it for the Internet. It's a honking, tough piece of software to use, and requires more time and effort to use effectively than any other piece of software that I've had contact with.
We have spent three months, and will spend the next six months, figuring out how to migrate our challenged installation into an installation that works at a minimal level.
Considering our experience, the stats that MSFT is quoting are, without question, vastly inflated. The active MOSS community is pitifully small and, if you check the MSFT support forums, dominated by one or two (paid?) MVPS who censor harsh comments and/or posts that place Sharepoint in a difficult light.
While it may be trying to capture more marketshare with Services 2010, I can't imagine that an even more bloated hulk will make life simpler. In fact, if the demands become ever more stringent (64 bit architecture, etc), they'll be updating themselves way out of our realm!
Shuddering at the thought of more MOSS, and of waking up to MOSS tomorrow morning, A Massachusetts-based Admin
The issue isn't whether the sales numbers are good. The issue is whether it is really successful - are that many people actually using it? There's a world of difference between, say 80% happy, productive customers and 15% happy, productive customers. When marketing is using these numbers to imply that your own purchase would open the gates of success, what those numbers really mean are important and worth criticizing.
But if it just got thrown into a package, then no.
There were giant stacks of unsold Xbox 360s sitting in stores for months after the holidays because Microsoft has so overstuffed the retail channel
And your proof for this is to be found - where?
Alone among the three major videogame consoles, sales of the PS3 are down about 19% from November 2007, according to the latest stats from the NPD Group. Sony was only able to sell 378,000 PS3s this November, compared to 466,000 last year.
And the problem for Sony isn't the recession, it's the PS3. Microsoft put up respectable numbers with its Xbox 360, selling 836,000 units vs 777,000 in November 2007. And Nintendo's Wii continues to dominate the market, more than doubling sales from 981,000 to 2.04 million. Sony's PS3 A Sinking Ship: Sales Plummet [Dec 12, 2008]
In a deep recession, retailers keep their inventories of big-ticket items paper-thin.
Every square inch of floor space needs to be generating sales. Product is checked out the front door or it is trucked out the back. I
That had to hurt.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Really, I need some insightful analysis from Forrester or Gartner before I can make up my mind. They at least are impartial analysts of key trends, backing their statements with real credible verifiable data and rigorous adherence to reporting standards.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I know that Law Firms had a conference to use Sharepoint for Legal Practice Management Software. I wrote an original ASP based Docket Calendar, and Law Firms want to move their Docket Calendars to Sharepoint. I can tell you that when you have a law firm and you want reliability, Microsoft isn't always the best choice. Some law firms still use Wordperfect and other non-MS software because they have found MS software to be low quality in performance and reliability. But the majority of big law firms are hooked on Microsoft for everything as Microsoft bundles software into neat packages for them and provides paid support for everything. The big law firms think that putting everything on Microsoft is a safe bet, but the law firm I worked at went millions of dollars over budget because of support calls, replacing hardware, replacing software, and hiring consultants when Microsoft could not give any answers or solutions to our problems. Back then it was Windows 2000, Office 2000, and Visual BASIC 6.0, and ASP 3.0, but the move to Dotnet only made matters worse. Finally Microsoft is working out the bugs in Dotnet, but in doing so they have created new ones. Sharepoint 3.0 was a nifty program until Microsoft filled it with bloated features that it needs Windows 2008 Server because it won't run on older Windows Servers forcing companies to pay for upgrades to Windows 2008 Server and new server hardware, just like the last time I used Windows Server and Microsoft software in a legal environment.
Keep in mind these are "hidden costs" that do not count many wasted work hours trying to work around the MS bugs in programming, or trying to restore a crashed server or workstation. That expenses can reach record amounts as well as have downtime for the entire firm.
There are only two known FOSS alternatives to Sharepoint but Wiki sites are usually better and faster and in most cases free to use. I tried getting Wiki implemented in my former work places only to be laughed at. But a Wiki search is faster than a Sharepoint search, and a Wiki need not use Windows Server and can run on Linux, *BSD Unix, or Mac OSX or some other platform to save money.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Dear Microsoft Corporation,
I am considering upgrading from MS Paint to Sharepoint. I am concerned, however, about the ease of use of Sharepoint versus MS Paint. I have heard that Sharepoint can be complex and may take a long time to learn. I mostly draw funny captions on pictures of cats. Is Sharepoint the best platform for me?
LoL I can haz laf!
Because, strangely, Sharepoint might be the best product for that application. Lots of little document files that need a tiny bit of post-store metadata -- yep, that'll work.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
No, Microsoft wouldn't lie about statistics.... Would they?
Dont most companies overestimate things just to make their products look better?
I'm a consultant for an Microsoft Gold Partner VAR for one of the Microsoft business applications, and a lot of times the talking heads at Microsoft will go on and on about the "Microsoft Stack" and how CRM can integrate with SharePoint and all this kind of stuff, but in all the years that I have been working in this field, I have never once encountered an implementation of SharePoint at a client, nor have I had any requests to do one.
That does not mean that there isn't interest at a lot of these companies for SharePoint, though. It's just that the total cost after purchasing the licenses and then paying someone to implement it properly is too cost prohibitive for the types of companies that would benefit from using it.
Furthermore, there really are not very many "guru-level" people on SharePoint. There's barely any "adequate" talent for SharePoint... I hear it all the time from a lot of my peers that there's not even anyone out in the field trying to get a practice started up around it in this very large, very wealthy (per captia) city. Excuses range from "lack of demand" to "no one to do the work", to the ever popular "everyone is only seeing the tip of the iceberg" that Microsoft is so apt to spin.
So, that's my perspective as someone in the realm of that field... whatever that is worth.
Of course the numbers are inflated by MS! A Sharepoint license comes automatically with SBS and Enterprise versions of 2003 and 2008. I have plenty of customers who are running SBS, and very few of them are actually utilizing the Sharepoint license that they have, nor are they utilizing the Exchange license that comes with it either. In MS's defense, Sharepoint is actually really cool for what it does, but it has a fairly limited target market.
My software never has bugs.
It just develops random features.
A major multinational company lying about their sales? I'm shocked. Absolutely shocked.
linquendum tondere
This is like arguing over how many copies of MS Paint are used on a daily basis. It hardly matters. Microsoft sold it, and pocketed the income, which is cash that most likely WONT go to a SharePoint competitor, whether SharePoint gets used or not.
The story isn't merely to begrudge MS its sales. The point here is that even perceived momentum will push more users into Sharepoint on the assumption that a large user base is using it, which will be interpretted as Sharepoint being a system that will be any easy sell:
Such a marketing approach will mis-lead IT departments away from knowledge management systems that really solve the problems that Sharepoint does not by appealing to the corporate desires laid-out in the bullets above.
Your analogy to MS Paint is wholly faulty because the business for software like paint is absolutely tiny. The market for knowledge management systems is huge. I.e. No one gives a shit about the market for computerized paint software but everyone wants to manage knowledge with a web-based approach.
I can tell you hundreds of companies that have licensed Sharepoint for all their employees and no one in the company knows that it even exists. Many small businesses run and Exchange server. In many cases the cheapest way to get an exchange server is to get an SBS license which wouldn't you know it includes Sharepoint licenses. These companies only want outlook to work, they have no interest in the other bits that come with SBS.
Sharepoint is Hard to correctly configure...and the biggest mistake most people make is clicking next all the way through the installation wizard. You get a working Sharepoint environment, but in nearly every case it's not the one you want. Even if they take the time to do a tiered install, it will still most likely suck, as most documentation out there doesn't address any of the complex issues that come into play, they just give a single or at most 3 server overview and leave the rest up to the user to figure out. It's just so easy to get an install up and running, but that's completely wrong.
I work at a small Credit Union with a small IT staff and we've (meaning not me!) migrated our intranet to MOSS. Unfortunately i have literally zero confidence that we can recover anything if the server(s) go tits up. Anything we recover will be pure luck. (I'm made my concerns known, and lies and just plain ignorance pushed the pilot live.) I've inherited a Frankenstein implementation that was done doing the "click" install sprinkled with a few nonsensical decisions. Sharepoint SHOULD NOT have a click through installer, simply because nobody sane would run a production environment any larger than a 100 employees on it. Most organizations end up with the click through install pilot project suddenly becoming the live system, i've seen it too many times...and i makes me want to puke 'cause now we are one of them. It's just simply retarded! I'm now going to have to do a complete re-implementation and migrate all the content over as soon as somebody decides that it's a priority. (probably 3 seconds after the portal pukes all over the server room floor.)
Now...with all that said, a correctly configure MOSS environment integrated with SSRS and some of the other tools does have some very, very nice features that provides a lot of power. But to maintain and manage this you NEED full time Sharepoint administrators and development staff, but because it's possible to get it up and running in a day clicking "Next" nobody seems to understand that they have let a ravenous beast into their house that needs full time tummy rubs just to keep from chewing up the furniture! This is NOT a tool for small businesses at all, or even some of the larger ones particularly because many of the Sharepoint consultants suck and/or are very expensive. If i didn't have a thousand other responsibilities that have immediate member or staff impact i'd be able to focus on fixing our implementation...but i don't, and frankly i don't really care anymore - i've tried to bring the issue forward that this needs to be a priority. thank god i'm not the one who will have to answer to the CEO if the site explodes before I have time to re-implement it.
Sharepoint and related tools is good stuff...but almost NEVER properly implemented. Blah!
If they were smart they would be giving it away for free. You might as well be freezing your documents in carbonite.
It's been known for a while that numbers on stuff like their CRM and Sharepoint aren't based on actual USER base. Merely how many licenses are out in the wild including guestimates of pirate copies.. This means, if you have an Action Pack subscription, you're counted. If you're on MSDN, you're counted. If you're a warez hound pirating this stuff in south-central Spotlsylvania, yup, you're counted too-ski.
So it comes as exactly zero surprise that the numbers are so baked that someone's considering an intervention.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Any way you look at those numbers the momentum is huge, lop 50% off, hell lop 75% off and it is still a massive number for a portal/collaboration product.
You make a great point about how large the user base for sharepoint is. However, if the numbers are so great, why would they need to inflate them? If the article above is correct, the vendor's sales and marketing experts believe that the sales boon to be had from making the the user base appear larger than it is overrides the embarrassment of making up the figures.
This would contrast with the scenario that you sketch out where sharepoint has really penetrated to such a degree that no lying on momentum is required.
Every organization I have dealt with since the dawn of SharePoint still has 90% of the sites every created up and 'available' even if they haven't had any content updates in the last 5 years. Counting 'zombie' SharePoint sites is a nice way to pad your deployment stats, IMHO. SharePoint is overkill for dead projects where no one will ever look at anything other than the executive summary of your lessons learned document.
I administer three full production sharepoint sites at a major university; currently for intranet use only. The reason we only use sharepoint for intranet use is licensing. Our webmaster, who is by no means a Microsoft fanatic, would love to implement sharepoint as a CMS, mostly because of the ability to manage content types and therefore content, and to make our C# developers happy. However, since a license to use sharepoint as the basis for a public-facing website would cost us approximately $1500 to $5000 per year, we have opted to use IIS and hand-rolled site management, which costs us exactly nothing, since windows server 2008 and IIS 7 are a part of our site license.
Yes, sharepoint can be an administrative nightmare due to its complex schema, but like any complicated system, once under its hood, it's really not that bad. The ability to easily code 'web parts' - the bits and pieces that make up a sharepoint site - and the centralized content management facilities make it an ideal platform. Unfortunately, the fact that it doesn't use any of IIS 7's caching or application routing facilities, in addition to the previously mentioned licensing issues, make me only hopeful that sharepoint 2010 will rise where sharepoint 2007 has so far failed.
if people spent even 1/2 the time working on competing apps rather then whinging about MS, OSS might actaully make some headway.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Because we don't *use* the sharepoint on our intranet. Not that us Devs didn't try, it's just too darn unintuitive and difficult! You just want to smack it for misbehaving so often, like a red-haired step-child!
I object. The unlimited seat license I sold implies excellent market penetration.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299961&cid=28668819
Actually no SBS does not include SharePoint licenses, well at least not the ones that are counted in revenue. SBS includes WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) which is a freebie, the revenue generating version is not included in any other product, you have to specifically purchase it, MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server).
While I am not a fan of SharePoint at all, I understand that one thing it does is provide versioning for MS Office files, such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Now, I am used to version control from CVS, Subversion, and Git, and I think this is immensely valuable.
Having worked in various organizations which use MS Office extensively, I see that a lot of time is wasted figuring out which is the latest version of a document, where it is, what the differences are between that version and some version that one has previously read, who changed some part and why, and where to find an older version (often because the latest version turns out to be corrupted).
All these things are easy with Git and plain text ... but are there any good solutions for, say, MS Office and/or OpenOffice.org documents? It seems to me that diff is the real challenge. You will want the output to be human-readable, which means a binary diff or even a diff of the XML won't do, and from what I've seen from MS Office's "compare documents", that's pretty much useless, too. Has anyone managed to create something that is actually usable?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
SBS includes WSS3, but so does plain old Windows Server 2008 - but theres no evidence that those licences are being counted here.
It could be worse, you could be forced to use Lotus Notes or Plumbtree,
It could be even worse: rather than your company forcing you to use Plumtree, it could be your country.
In related news, my new Hello World Server (TM) has released hit 10 billion CALs. That might have something to do with my 10 billion CALs grant per Hello World Server (TM).
Actually, it's quite relevant. Microsoft, like most businesses, isn't interested in selling a product once to every person. To do so, they could at best sell approximately one copy to every person on Earth; then they'd be stuck having to create a whole new product. Since Microsoft can't sell multiple *exact* copy to each person, they instead make minor or major improvements to an existing product. If Microsoft sells a product to someone and that person don't use it, they're less likely to buy an updated version of that product (short of some "clever" bundling to pump up numbers, eg. MS Paint, or monopolist pressures to conform).
Since SharePoint is being sold and doesn't grant enough leverage to be freely bundled with another product to make a de facto installed monopoly, Microsoft is trying to highlight CAL numbers to make the impression that SharePoint is developing a monopolistic position and therefore it would be wise to buy future versions even if one is upset with the current version. Yes, Microsoft has good [marketing] reason to advertise their SharePoint sales figures, but their push to highlight CAL sales is obviously intended to spark a belief in companies that there are hundreds of millions of users of SharePoint. But, that's about as absurd as thinking most IPv4 class A blocks were significantly used or my Hello World Server (TM) is really serving anywhere near close to 10 billion people.
In short, if Microsoft wants to gloat about sales figures, that's great. I wouldn't expect any less. But, the least they could do is conduct a survey to actually get some handle on actually license usage. Otherwise, the 100 million figure is almost entirely an irrelevant number (it's small relevance is some idea on the hypothetical average cost per user, but odds are good that there's an error upwards of at least an order of magnitude, hence the need for a survey).
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
A lot of people bashing Sharepoint, no surprise there, but here's something you need to be aware of. Sharepoint is where projects go to die. Seriously, nothing kills a project faster, and more quietly, than putting it on Sharepoint.
Dead projects may seem like a bad idea, but we all know that not every project deserves life. Take a server, install Sharepoint/Sharepoint Services on it, and wait. When you get "that project", the one no one wants to touch with a 10 foot pole, that's when it's time for Sharepoint. You can make a case for using it for just about anything. Collaboration is a very powerful buzzword.
Setup a bare bones template site to use for anything like this that comes along, customize it for the walking dead project in question, give all the users rights, a brief tutorial on how to login and use it, then wait. If they want more training, say that you will look into off-site or online training options to stall. You'll find that a few eager beavers will upload a few documents, customize a few things, maybe even send out a workflow or something, but all activity on the site should wither and die within two weeks. If you happen to get some savant who just thinks it's great and is trying to spur everyone else into using it, make him and admin of the site. That will sufficiently bog him down. Within 6 months, they'll be back to printing out emails and meeting in person to avoid having to use the site.
We have a corporate sharepoint site that is supposed to help us share documents and collaborate. In reality, it is a confusing maze of pages with way too much embedded functionality.
In summary, I hate it!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
it's included (and installed) by default. It's SharePoint Services, but I doubt MS makes that distinction.
body massage!
is a piece of junk. It constantly freezes, crashes, takes several minutes doing something while not refreshing the GUI, and is excessively slow. I can't say much better for SharePoint itself.
You must be new here!
The problem here is that Microsoft includes addons in their mainstream software and expects users and admins to be fully up-to-speed with the implementation/roll-out, training with the expectation that it is a lock-step process without too much regard to why they put it there in the first place.
It's a mind-set game IMHO where you have to closely follow MS thought processes, jargon and developmental time-line to make it work effectively, even though you don't necessarily want it. In other words you have to know what MS is thinking all the time and there is no easy way to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on courses, reading, subscribing, trialing and the whole shebang.
It's a 'top down' implementation. They think of it, program it, sell it or give it away and expect everyone to use it.
I think what would be better would be more emphasis on what the user wants in a 'bottom up' approach.
What's the point in trying to change office practice and procedure when it is either not necessary, too hard to implement and train for? Or is it another waste of certificate paper and gold stars?
How much collaboration do you really need? A lot depends on management practices, when it is rare nowadays to find individuals who can complete a task without sharing or intervention as opposed to unnecessary and pointless team work which may be counter-productive.
My $0.99c worth
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Sharepoint is for morons who can't figure out how to program a real website.
what is sharepoint ?
Read radical news here
A big corporation always tells the truth, am I right? They're all designed to serve us quality products for fair prices!
Is there a "Duh" tag on /. ?
As a campus we were surprised when we were looking into sharepoint - that we were already licensed for it (but apparently needed some other licenses to do something useful). That said I suspect it's simply a marketing ploy - drop sharepoint licenses into campus packages and then your pitch is: "Well you're already paying for it (mostly)". If the number of MS people who were sent to do the info sessions and pitch are any indication of expected future investment then I highly doubt this is anywhere near as easy to manage as they say (or our admins seem to want to believe).
AFAICT, the main reason sharepoint is popular is because it doesn't require people to make particularly great changes to the way they work.
For years people collaborated on documents by emailing them around. Some people took this to its logical extreme and never actually wrote any emails - they wrote everything they wanted to say in Word and emailed that as an attachment.
Then it was pointed out that a lot of space would be saved by emailing a link to the document and you wouldn't be left wondering who had the most recent version.
Sharepoint doesn't require a particularly great change to this - once a document is in sharepoint, Office will open and save it directly so you don't have to mess around with storing it locally, working on it and finally remembering to upload it separately through some sort of web interface. A wiki, while it's a perfectly good solution - particularly for things which are never likely to require either printing or sending to an outside organisation - does require the end user to get used to a totally different way of working, which is never an easy sale.
pain in the ass to do it in sharepoint, it's probably quite easy to do with a LAMP solution.
Tell me ...
Is sharepoint ready for the DMZ yet? No application level authentication is pretty much a dealbreaker for any company that knows the first thing about security. Sadly (or to your delight if you are a competitor who notices their employee using it), many companies deploy it (with full access to internal documents) anyway.
so the OSS crowd have sour grapes about people buying sharepoint and not utilising all it's features? So why even bring sales features into it, since that's not the arguement?
if people spent even 1/2 the time working on competing apps rather then whinging about MS, OSS might actaully make some headway.
That's a great job at re-framing what I said. But of course, that's not what I said. It isn't an issue of using features. It's an issue of simply USING it. Are those sales figures representing successful installs like the marketing is implying they are? That's the point. If those are simply sales of software that lead to abandoned projects, then it's not a very compelling reason to make that investment oneself.
Oh - and nice red herring about competing apps. I've set up wikis that have been more effective than some of the SharePoint installs I've seen.
Does anyone use SharePoint as a ticketing system?
Microsoft changed the name from "Office Server Extensions" to "SharePoint". They seem to finally get it--"it" being that users don't speak geek, and SharePoint makes a hell of a lot more sense than "server extensions".
Working with sharepoint for the past year on our Intranet, I have witnessed the pros and cons to it.
I believe the success/failure of this product is no due to it being bloated, the UI or limited customizable options, but due to organizations allowing their end-users to do whatever they want with it with the system.
A distributed-based publishing model is often promised as the Saviour to organizations to wrestle control from their corporate web teams. Yet, this model turns out to be a disaster with unimaginable amounts of useless content and documents being published because "they can". Any CMS - sharepoint or not - fails in this environment and it is often the software that is blamed, rather than the core problem - allowing everyone to make the mess.